Marcello Carlin and Lena Friesen review every UK number one album so that you might want to hear it

Wednesday, 27 August 2014

QUEEN: A Kind Of Magic

(#331: 14 June
1986, 1 week)

Track listing: One
Vision/A Kind Of Magic/One Year Of Love/Pain Is So Close To Pleasure/Friends
Will Be Friends/Who Wants To Live Forever/Gimme The Prize (Kurgan’s Theme)/Don’t
Lose Your Head/Princes Of The Universe

Five-and-a-half years after their soundtrack to Flash Gordon, Queen were asked to write
and record some songs for the movie Highlander.
So much had changed in the interim. Where the Flash Gordon soundtrack is, with two exceptions, utilitarian
instrumental accompaniment (with speech and sound-effect samples) to the action
in a trashy but harmless piece of semi-camp revivalist fluff, the music for Highlander – six of this record’s nine
songs appear in some shape or form throughout the film – is as flatly bombastic
as the movie itself. Revivalist fluff was no longer good enough by the
mid-eighties, as though it ever had been, but Highlander is a dreary trench of noisy, pretentious and violent
nonsense directed by an over-promoted video editor who, perhaps and
depressingly correctly, saw that audiences were perfectly happy to gawp at
loud, colourful, disconnected balls of cinematic string drained of purpose,
genuine emotion or belief, that flash, dazzle and cutting to the chase were all
that counted (in the last decade and a half, all but three of Russell Mulcahy’s
films have been TV movies or straight-to-video/DVD jobs).

And who were these absurd figures on the cover, seemingly
snatched straight from a mid-eighties Pernod cinema advertisement? “People say
you’ve had your day,” Mercury self-references on “Princes Of The Universe,” and
the impression is certainly one of an ageing rock band trying hard to make its
audience believe that it can still be relevant in the eighties. But so little
of this music breathes.

One of the three songs not included on Highlander was “One Vision,” commissioned
for a disgraceful piece of cinematic war propaganda called Iron Eagle, wherein Louis Gossett Jr. and others take on those
villainous Libyans; the consequences of this type of thinking are painfully
apparent today, and although the song’s central riff itself is fine – almost good
enough to be Def Leppard – the introduction, swamped by movie dialogue and
whirring warcraft FX, is reminiscent of “Welcome To The Pleasuredome,” and the
song itself barks along like Stanley Milgram square-bashing, with its one this
and one that. “A Kind Of Magic” is no better with its “one dream, one soul, one
prize” and might even be worse with its “rage” that will last “a thousand years”;
this is perilously close to Riefenstahl rock. Between them, fried chicken japes
or no, these songs carve out the pathway to today’s dead mainstream pop with
its deafening odes to heroes and suns and flames.

Mercury gives a fabulous white soul performance, almost
worthy of the 1986 Prince, on “One Year Of Love,” but unfortunately somebody
forgot to convey that information to the rest of the group. “Pain Is So Close
To Pleasure,” with its pained falsetto vocal and demo-standard musical backing –
it sounds, of all things, that they’re trying to be the Diana Ross of “Chain
Reaction” – is one of the most anaemic songs to appear on a major eighties rock
album (even Mika would sound bolder than this). “Friends Will Be Friends” meanwhile
drops us right back in 1973 and Mott the Hoople, and plods like a listless
mash-up of “We Are The Champions” and “Saturday Gigs.”

Side two shows some (very) minor improvement; both “Gimme
The Prize” (the bad guy has all the best tunes) and “Don’t Lose Your Head”
(including, unrecognisably and incredibly, the speaking voice of Joan
Armatrading) thwack along very entertainingly in a 1986 Sigue Sigue
Sputnik/Test Dept/Propaganda manner, with big beats, distended vocal samples,
and Brian May’s guitar which at different times calls up the spectres of Billy
Squier’s “The Stroke” and ZZ Top’s “Legs”; and yet “Don’t Lose Your Head”
progresses to Pet Shop Boys stateliness and even a post-Big Country synthesised
bagpipe threnody. But the closing “Princes Of The Universe” demonstrates that
they have learned nothing; you get the feeling that if Queen were really on top
of things, they wouldn’t feel the need to shout their confirmation out so
petulantly.

But then there is the elephant in the record’s sitting
room; “Who Wants To Live Forever,” a song unlike anything else on the album,
and hardly performed by Queen – just Mercury and May with Michael Kamen’s
orchestra. Indeed, as May sings the first verse, one could be forgiven for
thinking he was Morten Harket; but then Mercury comes in, with the lyric’s
regretfully apocalyptic West Side Story
rebuttal – and all of a sudden he, and Queen, are made to realise how things
really are. This performance has long transcended its cinematic origins –
wherever you go in the world, however long you live, you always end up dragging
yourself along with you; and the angel-forsaking-immortality thing will be
better dealt with the following year by Wim Wenders in Wings Of Desire – and is now impossible to listen to without
foreknowledge of what was shortly to follow.

And so, in a year which seemed to be stalked by death and
endings wherever one looked, here is…well, it is an ending of sorts, or the
expression of fear of an ending. But if you examine the tenets of
Zoroastrianism – and its belief in one universal, omnipotent god (Ahura Mazda) is
fully in keeping with the beliefs expressed in “One Vision,” more so than
anything to do with Dr King or Live Aid – then you will find that they state
that earthy life is a temporary condition wherein the believer must deal with
the struggle between truth and falsehood. This is not to say that when the
believer dies, they will be reincarnated; rather, their soul is returned to the
protection of their guardian spirit, or fravashi.
Even then, in the spiritual world, the soul is expected to continue the battle
between what is true and what is not. There is not the calm acceptance of
mortality that one finds in Buddhism; the expectation here is that there is
always more work to do, more battles to fight. You might “live forever,” even
if you don’t particularly savour the prospect.

The feeling with A
Kind Of Magic, however, is overwhelmingly one that Queen’s moment had
passed, but that they were fated to be “Queen” for a long time still to come
(this is far from being their final number one album). There is portentousness
and sentimentality where once there was lightness and laughter, and perhaps in
some respects there was good reason for this. But it was as if lightness and
laughter just weren’t enough for audiences in or after the eighties; there has
to be something more, even if everything that attracted us to the music in the
first place is being systematically turned to vapour. “Take me to the future of
your world,” asks Mercury in “Princes Of The Universe.” You know, I think he
really believed that.

4 comments:

Interesting. I quite like the album, and I love how over the top Queen are in general. I'm a big fan of introspective music, be it post-hardcore or folk, but I love how Queen just shun all of that and play unashamedly brash stuff.

Another great post. If your stern warning to commenters has been prompted by abuse from disgruntled Queen fans, you are joining a great tradition. I remember a delightfully bilious review of 'One Vision' from Elvis Costello on a Radio 1 record review show, after which he predicted a deluge of complaints, and urged listeners to send them directly to him, rather than to Broadcasting House.

On the subject of songs looking different with the benefit of hindsight, 'One Vision' definitely qualifies. I remember Laibach's 1987 cover seeming hilarious at the time, but it had become much less funny only seven years later.

Maybe my memory fails me here but wasn't The Smiths third LP The Queen Is Dead released around the same time as this one? I remember listening to both of them at the same time and I always felt that the title of that Smiths LP was unfortunately so adequate when I was listening to A Kind of Tr..Magic.Listening to both records back in the summer of 1986 I remember thinking that the titles of these two records should have been switched.